Eastern Hub: NOISE Program Recap

We are youth from the NOISE (New Opportunities for Innovative Student Engagement) Program. You can learn more about NOISE in the Eastern Hub here.

In this program, we learned that we could bring positive change in our community through research. First we started with learning about different research skills. Next we had to think about what issues were important to us in the Pinecrest Community catchment.

YOUth Heroes were a part of the program during the first half to help us understand the importance of getting involved and the impact we can have, while Youth Active Media (YAM) helped us learn the technical skills needed to create good messaging and technical video skills.

Some of the specific skills we learned were:

Research skills

How to gather and use statistics

How to gather reliable information

More about the successes and challenges in our community

Resources in our community

Other organizations

Interviewing skills

How to make a survey

Filming and technical skills

How to edit a video

Project management

Leadership and communication skills

How to advocate – making sure others notice the issues important to us

How to speak with stakeholders such as local politicians

Public speaking skills

Time management

And so much more!

We were incredibly committed to the three issues we worked on. We worked in research pods (teams) to tackle our issues. The three topics were:

POVERTY

Vision for Change: This group’s idea was to make eyeglasses more accessible to all. Check out our video here.

AFTER SCHOOL PROGRAMS

This group noticed that there were a lot of after school program options available to their peers, but that many did not know about them. Their idea was to create a central location and social media campaign where information important to community youth would be centralized. Check out our video here.

YOUNG DRIVERS

This group believed that many of their peers struggled to get access to affordable driver’s education. Their research centralized around the benefits to driver’s education and if there would be benefit in offering it in high school as a credit. Check out our video here.

At our graduation celebration on May 7th, we showed a video highlighting our program. Youth Active Media put this video together and it was neat having them follow us through our learning.

Thank you for taking the time to learn more about the very important work we have done over the past four and a half months! We will miss the program but a few of us might end up continuing our work with YouthREX.

To see more of what we’ve been up to, you can check out the post about the Community Showcase Event we hosted back in March!